452 HISTORY OF RELIGION 



A second fundamental conception of historical theology is that 

 all religion has a natural origin in the impression made by nature 

 upon man and the sense of obligation. The idea that all religion has 

 the same origin, but that this origin is the supernatural revelation 

 made to the first man, can no longer be entertained. There was no 

 first man. By scarcely perceptible changes the animal was gradually 

 transformed into a man, and the children are not likely at any time 

 to have been so unlike their parents that the former could without 

 hesitancy and with justice be called men, while the latter were 

 designated as beasts. The various myths concerning the first man 

 have no historic value, and there is no evidence that man in the 

 lowest stages of his development cherished religious sentiments of 

 such purity, and held religious conceptions of such adequacy, that 

 they can only be accounted for by a miracle. The earliest records of 

 civilized men in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates do not 

 bear out the frequently made assertion that they were monotheists, 

 or showed signs of being nearer to a pristine monotheism than their 

 successors, and long ages lie between them and the dawn of human 

 intelligence on our planet. There are no indications of the supposed 

 primitive revelation. 



Religion has a natural origin. The elements out of which it grew 

 undoubtedly existed long before anything like the present type of 

 man had been evolved. The immediate ancestors of man may be 

 supposed, on account of their arboreal habits and the high develop- 

 ment of their prehensile faculties by which it was possible for them 

 to examine things closely, to have had extraordinarily vivid impres- 

 sions of the objects around them and the play of nature's forces. 

 The prolonged period of gestation and infancy had a tendency at 

 once to develop the sense of dependence and the consciousness of 

 the sexual life, while the gregarious instinct, evoked by inferior 

 physical strength and superior mentality, aroused a keener sense of 

 expediency and necessitated social adjustments. As the expedient 

 course of action, commended by repeated trial, became the common 

 law, a sense of obligation to follow it was engendered, and deviation 

 from it was vaguely felt to be wrong. The religious consciousness 

 seems to have arisen through a union of this sense of obligation, 

 developed in social relations, with the feeling of dependence upon 

 powers active in nature, such as beasts, reptiles, birds, and fishes, 

 stones, mountains, plants, and trees, rain, hail, snow, and clouds, 

 lightnings, sky, sun, moon, and stars. No distinction was, at the 

 time of this union, made between animate and inanimate objects, 

 body and spirit. Things were seen side by side on a horizontal plane, 

 and not one above another in an ascending scale. They were man's 

 kindred. Now one thing, now another impressed him with a feeling 

 of being determined by it, of weakness and dependence, and led 



